Safe Patient Project

Medical Errors

Wrong surgery, wrong medication, serious bedsores… Unsafe practices and poor quality care kill more than 440,000 patients each year and waste billions of dollars every year. What information do you have about the safety of your hospital? What protections do you have if the hospital makes a mistake with you?

Consumers Union Documents

The undersigned organizations represent healthcare providers, clinical researchers, public health experts, and consumer advocates. We are concerned that the proposed legislation as written fails to ensure a comprehensive and scientifically based approach that supports patients’ access to affordable treatments.

Consumers Union letter to National Quality Forum on its draft report “Risk Adjustment for Socioeconomic Status or Other Sociodemographic Factors” regarding risk-adjustment for some provider performance measures. CU’s primary concern is that such adjustments will hide differences in outcomes on quality and safety measures that exist when health care is delivered to patients from certain sociodemographic groups – for example, low-income, race, or age. Performance measures should reveal these differences.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A new study released today by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) found that hospital employees are only reporting fourteen percent of all medical errors and usually don’t change their practices to prevent future harm to patients.

“Patients and physicians would not benefit from legislation that instead of catapulting us into the future, could actually bring back some of the problems we thought we had left behind in the 20th century.

Activists

The mission of Washington Advocates for Patient Safety (WAPS) is to promote accountability, quality, safety, and responsibility in patient care. As the voice of patients, their goals are to eliminate medical errors and harm and to save more lives.

NEVER (NorthEast Voices for Error Reduction) is made up of member patient safety and advocacy organizations located throughout the northeast. The mission of NorthEast Voices for Error Reduction (NEVER) is the empowerment of patients and the elimination of healthcare harm by: advocating for patient interests in healthcare delivery; educating the public, the media, elected officials about patient safety, working toward a transparent and accountable healthcare system.

Stories about Medical Errors

My mother, 83, had knee replacement surgery at a small hospital in Wisconsin. Two days after surgery she developed shortness of breath and pressure in her chest. My sister, our mother’s caregiver, had to bring this to the attention of the medical staff. Chest x-rays were requested which revealed mild edema, enlarged cardiac silhouette, and Continue Reading

To Delay is Deadly

98,000 people die each year needlessly because of preventable medical harm. Efforts to reduce this are few and fragmented. With little transparency and no public reporting (except where hard fought state laws now require it), scarce data does not paint a picture of real progress.

In this report (PDF)
we give the country a failing grade on progress on select recommendations we believe necessary to create a health-care system free of preventable medical harm.